The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

The card

Everybody was looking at the horses. Marlys was at the slats talking to her gelding.

Earl was checking the hitch with a flashlight even though the sun was up, because the shadow under the gooseneck was deep. The farmer was asking me about my winches.

Tiffany came over to me slow, across the ice, unzipping her coat pocket. She had her arms down by her sides now. She pulled out a card, a debit card, and held it out.

“What do I owe you?” she asked. Her hand was shaking, and not from the cold.

I looked at the card, and then I looked at her face. She’d been crying a little and had wiped it off with her sleeve.

She looked younger than 32, and tired, and very much like somebody bracing to be told a number she couldn’t pay.

I didn’t reach for it.

She held it out a little farther, and opened her mouth, and closed it again.

“I’m not taking that,” I said.

“You have to,” she said. “The others said eight hundred. You did it in an hour. You came out on ice. You have to let me pay you.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Here’s what I want. You take that card and you give it to the vet who checks these horses this afternoon. Every one of them. Don’t skip the young one because he looks fine. Have them look at that gelding’s legs and listen to his gut.”

She stared at me.

“Dwight’s out of Oswego, and he’ll come to your place on a day like this if you call him before noon,” I said. “Pay him. That’s what I want.”

What she said

The farmer was standing right there. The woman from Parsons was right there.

The two road-crew men were leaning on their truck ten feet away. And Marlys had turned around from the slats and was looking at us.

Tiffany lowered the card. She looked at it a long time, and then she looked at me, and then she turned around and looked at all of them.

“She bought that truck herself,” she said.

It wasn’t loud. But it was clear, and on a morning that cold, with no traffic, sound carries. Everybody heard it.

“I’ve been telling people Brandon bought it for her,” she said. “He didn’t. She bought it with her own money, and she pays for it every month, and she just got my horses out of a ditch that nobody else in this county would come to for three hours.”

Marlys looked at the ground. I think she remembered Fort Scott, too.

“I’ve been calling her the tow girl for three years,” Tiffany said. Her voice was steady now, which I think cost her more than crying would have.

She kept going. “That’s not what she is. She’s a wrecker operator. And she’s better at it than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

The farmer cleared his throat and looked at me. “I’ve got a grain truck that needs to go to the shop in Chanute next week,” he said. “You do that kind of thing? Long haul with the heavy?”

“I do,” I said.

“Then I’ll call you,” he said. And he did, the next Tuesday, and he’s called me four times since.